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Wednesday, February 06, 2008

bush legalizes torture*** UPDATED

SO... I just got home from watching the very disturbing documentary called Taxi to the Dark Side. I urge you ALL to run to see it, that is when it is officially released. The film is about the capture and torture of political prisoners from Afghanistan and Iraq in the United States military prisons since the beginning of Bush's War on Terror. If ANYTHING will make someone see the evil that this administration has created as foreign policy, this film will.

I've always known that the war in Iraq has always been about oil, but this film really makes you ask the question if that's really what it's about. Why would anyone WANT to inflict such inhumane treatment upon another human being, innocent or guilty? How can an administration that claims to be the leader of the free world and a stronghold for democracy condone, no, not condone, demand from its soldiers such degrading and dehumanizing means of torture as military interrogation strategy? And how can a government think that they can commit such horrifying atrocities upon another group of people? What are they really looking for? Is it really oil? And if not, then what is it? Why is the Bush administration doing this under the guise of protecting American citizens, when clearly, after such horrific treatment of other human beings, we have become the evildoers and can only expect future retaliation?

Sadly we need only to look at history to see the many examples of inhumane treatment to man, and not even past history but current history (like Darfur for example) to realize that power and greed cause evil. It is sickening to acknowledge that our tax dollars are going to Washington to support this debacle.

So the news that Bush has legalized yet another form of torture is proof that the forms of torture that were used in Abu Graib and Guantanamo are most likely still being used today. This story was seemingly buried in American media. I first read about it as headline news in the French newspaper Libération. As we know, most, if not all, of the torture techniques used in Abu Graib and Guantanamo were contrary to the Geneva conventions. Waterboarding being one of them.

My final note is that last week I sent a letter to Nancy Pelosi urging her to reclaim her dignity as my representative in Washington by introducing Articles of Impeachment against Bush and Cheney. I urge all of you to do the same.

5 comments:

Thanks for reminding me. I read an interview about this film -- I think it was Gibney himself.

If I were to have another life, I would make documentaries like this. My hatred for my civilian masters (and some military masters) runs so deep that I risk serious legal consequences. (The UCMJ is very different than civilian law in the US.) Of course, I hate the people that my civilian masters are trying to kill as well. In fact, I hate just about everyone!

I will definitely see the film and send you my thoughts and impressions. But I can tell you up front that none of this is fiction. In fact, the real story of our practices is worse -- believe it. I could talk for hours on this. I will let the film speak for itself, instead of outline how I feel about my civilian masters -- who, incidentally, were voted into office by stupid Americans. But the machinery for the current administration was already in place -- and it's "raison d'etre" was to support the standards of living of AMERICANS. So we should all take a little time to think about that unpleasant fact. We are ALL stained by this. We on the opposition side of the fence should be less concerned with taking the moral highground and more with taking responsibility. You get this -- but for every one of you, there are ten that don't.

And then there is the other side of the equation -- there are some very, very bad people over here in this region as well. You would not believe the horrors that these people perpetrate -- horrors that go unreported, in part because they are too unbelievable. And they are equal opportunity savages. They perpetrate these horrors against their own. And they are far worse than anything we do. I'm not equivocating. I'm stating a fact.

And most of them are not as a result of what Bush did, but of a very toxic ideology that is very real and that has been growing since the 1700s. But is that any of our business? And why are we even here in the first place? What is the real reason? I can only imagine the blowback we will feel twenty years from now, when all the young children here in the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia are grown, and organizations in the US, Canada, the UK, France, India, and even China are more sophisticated, better funded, and have more lethal technologies at their disposal.

Who wins? It looks like Huntington and Lewis may be right, as much as I hate people who think like them. And this means we are all going to be dragged into a war where nobody is right -- a sort of situation analogous to the one in Palestine, only on a global scale. (Some say we're there already -- although most Americans are still isolated from its effects.)

And so I find it very difficult to know what to think and who to believe without descending into (a) an absolute state of existential cynicism, or (b) a mystical explanation for why we are (all of us) this way.

Okay, I'll shut up and watch the film when I get a chance. Now I need to think about something else because I feel sick to my stomach.

Oh, one more thing. Pelosi is part of this machine. She drank the KoolAde and can't seem to speak in authentic sentences anymore. I doubt whether she has any dignity left -- much less the desire to help us reclaim it for her.

There was a day when she actually seemed real. Now she is just as hollow as the others.